plates upon their parasols,
Or somersaults that do not touch the ground,
Or tossing seven balls
In Most Celestial Order round and round.
A child’s quick sense of the ingenious stamped
All their invention: toys I used to get
At Christmastime, or the peculiar, cramped
Look of their alphabet.
Fragile and easily destroyed,
Those little boats of celluloid
Driven by camphor round the bathroom sink,
And delicate the folded paper prize
Which, dropped into a drink
Of water, grew up right before your eyes.
Now when we reached them it was with a sense
Sharpened for treachery compounding in their brains
Like mating weasels; our Intelligence
Said: The Black Dragon reigns
Secretly under yellow skin,
Deeper than dyes of atabrine
And deadlier. The War Department said:
Remember you are Americans; forsake
The wounded and the dead
At your own cost; remember Pearl and Wake.
And yet they bowed us in with ceremony,
Told us what brands of Sake were the best,
Explained their agriculture in a phony
Dialect of the West,
Meant vaguely to be understood
As a shy sign of brotherhood
In the old human bondage to the facts
Of day-to-day existence. And like ants,
Signaling tiny pacts
With their antennae, they would wave their hands.
At last we came to see them not as glib
Walkers of tightropes, worshipers of carp,
Nor yet a species out of Adam’s rib
Meant to preserve its warp
In Cain’s own image. They had learned
That their tough eye-born goddess burned
Adoring fingers. They were very poor.
The holy mountain was not moved to speak.
Wind at the paper door
Offered them snow out of its hollow peak.
Human endeavor clumsily betrays
Humanity. Their excrement served in this;
For, planting rice in water, they would raise
Schistosomiasis
Japonica, that enters through
The pores into the avenue
And orbit of the blood, where it may foil
The heart and kill, or settle in the brain.
This fruit of their nightsoil
Thrives in the skull, where it is called insane.
Now the quaint early image of Japan
That was so charming to me as a child
Seems like a bright design upon a fan,
Of water rushing wild
On rocks that can be folded up,
A river which the wrist can stop
With a neat flip, revealing merely sticks
And silk of what had been a fan before,
And like such winning tricks,
It shall be buried in excelsior.
LE MASSEUR DE MA SOEUR
I
My demoiselle, the cats are in the street,
Making a shrill cantata to their kind,
Accomplishing their furry, vigorous feat,
And I observe you shiver at it. You
Would rather have their little guts preserved
In the sweet excellence of a string quartet.
But, speaking for myself, I do not mind
This boisterous endeavor; it can do
Miracles for a lady who’s unnerved
By the rude leanings of a family pet.
II
What Argus could not see was not worth seeing.
The fishy slime of his one hundred eyes
Shimmered all over his entire being
To lubricate his vision. A Voyeur
Of the first order, he would hardly blench
At the fine calculations of your dress.
Doubtless the moonlight or the liquor lies
Somewhere beneath this visible
bonheur
,
Yet I would freely translate from the French
The labials of such fleet happiness.
III
“If youth were all, our plush minority
Would lack no instrument to trick it out;
All cloth would emphasize it; not a bee
Could lecture us in offices of bliss.
Then all the appetites, arranged in rows,
Would dance cotillions absolute as ice
In high decorum rather than in rout.”
He
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